Tokenization: A Blueprint for Stopping the SEC

So now what?

Thanks to the disintermediation spurred on by Satoshi, Ross, and Cody, - agorists have the ATF, IRS, DEA, FDA, & Federal Reserve cornered. Uber, Lyft, & Airbnb have more or less gutted the taxi and hotel cartels, liberating the hospitality industry.

So who’s next? Counter-economists need a target.

The consensus which seems to be arising in agorist circles is that a death blow to the SEC will do a great deal to liberate individuals from state financial controls and thus lift living standards and the quality of life for the entire global population.

While I admit it sounds like a lofty goal, I assure you we will do it and we will do it using the same peaceful, non-violent tactics and strategies that Cody, Ross, and Satoshi exemplified. With the assistance of blockchain technology, it’s possible for individuals today to tokenize anything and everything they can get their hands on. And we will. Indeed, the process is already underway.

“100% of stocks and bonds trading on Wall Street today could be tokenized, and in 5 years, 100% of stocks and bonds trading on Wall Street will be tokenized.”

-Robert GreifeldFormer Chairman & CEO of NASDAQ

But first, to prepare a battle plan we must understand the strategy our enemy is using. The SEC is one of numerous executive agencies, all of which enjoy a wide array of sweeping powers. To get an idea of just how powerful these agencies are, lawmaking can sometimes be as nonchalant as a bureaucrat’s utterance or even a circulating office memo. In 2007, the SEC arbitrarily created FINRA, or the “Financial Industry Regulatory Authority” and tasked them with “investor protection and market integrity” (a phrase that is obviously nonsensical but somehow still seems to resonate with the fluoride drinkers).

In reality, FINRA is a cartel consisting of 4200 brokerage firms, maintained in a compulsory fashion by the SEC. If the reader is unfamiliar with the concept of compulsory cartelization, click here. Taken together, these 4200 firms employ around 630k brokers. Last year alone, the cartel extorted $132 million from American citizens.

Agorists: FINRA is our target. We will break the cartel, and by doing so, publicly castrate the SEC for all the world to see. Financial regulators from Europe to Asia will be put on notice.

Consider the following possibility. You own a string of local coffee shops valued at $1 million and would like to go public in order to access additional capital. You realize that paying lawyers and accountants exorbitant amounts of money to guide you through the SEC’s registration process and hopefully get the state’s approval to have your business perpetually subjected to their reporting requirements doesn’t sound so tempting. Instead you decide to tokenize your business.

Your fledgling coffee shop franchise is valued at $1 million, & you decide to issue 1 million tokens. Each token thus represents a .000001% stake in ownership and can then be traded securely and anonymously on a digital exchange. Thus far, we've focused on equities, but if we account for real estate and bonds, the global market cap for potential tokenization becomes an astonishing $508 trillion.

Patrick Byrne was one of the first entrepreneurs to realize the value of this opportunity and has sunk over $100 million into the creation of one such exchange, tZERO. Unfortunately, centralized exchanges make easy targets for the state, and Byrne is compliant with FINRA and the SEC. However, there’s nothing prohibiting the creation of token-specific decentralized exchanges (DEX) modeled on ethereum’s IDEX or the waves DEX (though at the time of this writing, I know of none).

It’s only a matter of time until an agorist (perhaps you?) creates a secure and anonymous, token-based, DEX on scale with Coinbase or Kraken. In fact, the way events are unfolding, you may not have to.

Blockstream’s Elements project allows individuals to issue assets, and their Liquid network was created specifically to foment the safe and secure transmission of those tokens. Elements allows individuals to issue assets as a separate blockchain or as a sidechain pegged to BTC. Similarly, thanks to developments in the BCH community, Badger wallet allows individuals to create security tokens using Wormhole coins. The process is simple and user-friendly.

One additional benefit of tokenization is that it combines the horizontal and vertical counter-economic strategies as outlined by agorist theoretician Per Bylund here. Historically, the greatest advances in agorism (i.e. Silk Road, 3D-printed firearms, & cryptocurrencies) have resulted from a synthesis of local production and an unregulated network of exchange. The tokenization of securities and assets, when combined with DEX, Liquid Network, or Wormhole, masterfully achieves this synthesis.

Soon, the FINRA cartel will be broken and the SEC will be neutered and the free exchange of equities, bonds and real estate will become an inevitable and unstoppable force. Major corporations will be at a disadvantage if they continue to offer shares on legacy exchanges and will thus be peacefully, and voluntarily incentivized to move to stateless markets. Billions of entrepreneurs around the world will suddenly have access to vast amounts of capital which will in turn, cause a surge in technological innovation and living standards, disproportionately uplifting those in the developing world.